


When People Run in Circles (Madness redux)

by babyturtle



Category: Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow series - Gemma T. Leslie
Genre: Death, Groundhog Day, Horror, Madness, See endnotes for more specific potential triggers, Suicide Attempt, nonlinear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 20:11:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4235022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babyturtle/pseuds/babyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They found Simon’s body in the morning and everyone knew what happened: the Humdrum finally got him. This was it. </p><p>“No, Professor,” Baz learned over and whispered, “he did this to himself.” Then he blinked and he was back in his dorm room and Simon was asleep. </p><p>A.k.a the Groundhog day AU you definitely never wanted (nonlinear narrative), mentions of suicide and depression</p>
            </blockquote>





	When People Run in Circles (Madness redux)

**Author's Note:**

> More warnings in the endnotes;

  ****

Baz and Simon were smoking on the roof. “You can tell me,” Baz taunts, greedily wanting. “We both know you’re going to jump off that roof and start it all over again.”

Simon looked back at Baz and Baz doesn't know what other people see but Simon’s face is covered in blood and his arms hang limply at his side. Simon opened his mouth and Baz, as if sensing what was coming, leaned forward and shoved Simon off. Baz blinks.

Simon doesn't even hit the ground.

...

Penelope and Agatha corner Baz one day in the Commons. “Where’s Snow?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Baz replies, trying to shove past.

“Only,” Penelope shoulders on determinedly, “Only, he wasn’t at breakfast and he always meets us at breakfast.”

“Have you tried the astronomy tower? I hear he likes it up there.”

Penelope pales. “Who told you about that?”

“I’m not an idiot,” Baz walks away. He knew where Simon’s body was -- buried. He knew where it would stay. And then he blinks and he's back in his dorm, looking at a dirt covered Simon.

“Have you tried drowning yet?” Baz asks dryly. It's the only way he can ask, at this point. “It might clean you up.”

...

“Go away!” Baz shrieks. “Why can’t you stop doing this, you complete bastard, what is wrong with you?!”

“Baz --” Simon reaches a hand out and then drops it. “I love you,” he says.

“Fuck off,” Baz replies. “You’re just trapped in some sort of time looping hell with me.”

...

“You could, I don’t know, try not dying!”

Simon only looks at Baz. “Dead things long for death and I am a year and a half overdue. I want to be dead, Baz. I want to die. But I can't. It won't let me. It’s why I’m alive.”

Baz doesn’t understand what Simon is saying and doesn’t know whether or not to call bullshit.

...

The first time, the real first time, that Baz found Simon Snow’s body was the only time that Baz cried. They'd found Snow asleep -- pills -- a year and a half ago. Booze and half a bottle of sleeping pills but everyone knew it was the Humdrum. And then he woke up. And everyone knew it was a miracle.

He was dead when they found him but then the Mage revived him and Baz decided he was just sleeping.

...

Baz finds the same thing a year and a half later. Blink and Simon is sleeping.

...

“You tried to kill yourself?" Baz had asked, shocked.

"Twice," Simon had replied sadly. "It didn't work. It never works. It never let me die."

 

The words sounded familiar. 

...

Everyone knew it was the Humdrum again when they found Simon’s blood soaking the floor and Baz leaned over and whispered to the Mage, “No, Professor, he did this to himself,” only once before it’s swept back away in a blink.

...

Baz always remembers it. So does Simon. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” Baz asks and Simon never answers, just grins manically. And then kills himself. Blink. Life.

Rinse, repeat.

...

At fifty suicide attempts, Simon knows that Baz is a vampire and Baz knows that he’s misjudged Simon, that everyone has.

...

The seventy-fifth time, Simon confides to Baz, “I don’t think it’ll let me die, this world that saved me and then screwed me. I’m too magical. The magic they brought me back with is mine now. I'm pure magic, you know. The Mage revived me the first time I tried to do it. It was the magic the second time.” Half his lower jaw is missing. Storm clouds have covered the castle for seventy-five days. It hasn't rained once. 

Baz raises an eyebrow and wants to say something clever like  _practice makes perfect_ , but what comes out is “please stop trying.”

“Oh,” Simon says softly, looking at his chest with an awful expression on his face. “You did it. You killed me.”

Baz blinks and he’s back in his dorm. The shadows seem longer. 

...

**  
**

They have a party the hundredth time and decide to do a beheading because Simon can’t stop and Baz won’t ever understand that he thinks but he doesn't mind so much anymore.

Penelope and Agatha give them weird looks and want to be invited but Simon slaps Penelope and they both leave.

...

**  
**

The handprint is there on Penelope's face from when Simon slapped her when they wake up again. It’s reality, like the blood all over the great hall, red and sticky and attached to everybody’s feet, tracked everywhere. As they walk, Baz hears the squelching squishing sounds of wet blood moving around the castle, inhaling rusty mental and blood with their meals, unaware.

Only he and Simon see them, though, the little red hand prints, the little red foot prints. Simon taps Penelope’s cheek and she winces and he hugs her and she squeezes him back.

 

Baz tried to clean the blood, once. He'd started with the walls. He'd scrubbed for hours. Nothing changed on the walls, but when he looked at his wrists and arms, they were covered with drying coppery-red flakes. It was almost like paint. He'd tried again the next day. And the next. For seven weeks, Baz had tried to clean the blood and then on the eight day Simon asked him to stop. 

“I’ll be right back,” Simon says, and leaves.

“Leave him,” Baz tells Penelope dully. He does not think the red on her cheeks will ever fade. “He is going to jump off something high. Forgive him, he really does loves you Penelope.”

...

The hundred and fiftieth anniversary is the one where Baz starts killing Simon. Baz doesn’t mind the blood anymore and he and Simon are friends now.

“My love, will you kill me,” Simon’d asked, “cause it’d hurt less?”

When Simon speaks it sounds like it’s coming from a rusty grate, a hoarse painful sound that squeaks out of shredded vocal chords. The sky darkens, even though it is not night. The clouds look rusty.

Baz is not a good person. He sucks Simon dry.

...

In hundreds more times of living the same day and the same people Baz remembers the cold of being friendless. Wrapped around Simon like a lover or a snake he forgets.

He tells Simon of the coldness of his house and the terror as the looping time servers both of them further from their reality every day.

...

the twothosandsevetysomething-ish time is the time that simon says “please stop” butbazdoesn’tlisten-bazdoesn’tlistenanymore

...

On the three thousandth try, Baz is good enough to suck on Simon all day. They learn secrets about each other. On the three thousand and third try they are on a roof and Baz learns of Simon’s childhood abuse and the orphanage. He learns that Simon is not a happy person.

On the three thousand and fifth try, Baz learns about Simon’s depression. He thinks he knows, but then Simon turns to him and says, "The first time I tried to kill myself I was ten."

...

“I didn't just try to kill myself the second time,” Simon informs Baz. “I succeeded. They had to use magic to bring me back. It won’t go away. I belong to death but I am here.”

“I love you,” Baz tells him and twists his neck.

...

Simon’s body has stopped taking the beating it did before since Baz has taken over the job; but Simon has not retained the look of humanity.

“You deserve better,” Simon tells Baz through lips that are bloodied and cracked and caked and colorless. All his color is splayed out on the ground beneath them, trampled by student after student. The sky rumbles. The clouds move. The lake turns black. Simon's hand starts to fall apart. Baz loves him. 

...

“I want to die,” is the one thing Simon will repeat, though he has started repeating “no” and “please stop”.

Baz doesn’t want to stop. The castle is falling down. The students slip and fall and roll around in the blood. They smile without teeth. Baz hasn't seen the Mage outside his room in over a year of repeated days. 

...

Somewhere nearing the fivethousandthtenthousandthwhoevenknows try Simon says, “I’d like to do it myself today.”

...

Baz doesn’t have to turn around to know what the creaking on the bed means. He doesn’t have to turn around to hear Simon’s hitching heeeheee laughter suddenly be cut off.

And he doesn’t have to see Simon’s bloated hand to know he’s dead. Because he isn’t. Blink.

...

Baz looks, at last, up at Simon’s body attached to his hand still dangling from the dorm ceiling. Blink.

...

Baz looks up at Simon’s dangling body and then shrugs and goes to class. Simon will be alive soon anyway.

...

Baz goes to bed and wakes up to Simon’s corpse. Baz is glad Simon is coming back to him. He’s glad Simon killed himself, that first time. It brought them so much. Baz only wishes that he could have been the one to kill him, this time.

Maybe that’s why it was taking longer.

Baz resolves never to let Simon doing to the dying part alone again.

...

When Agatha finds him the next day, Baz mutters something about the astronomy tower. He wants to slap her but he’ll wait for Simon. He's forgotten that Simon slapped Penelope. He's forgotten so much. He hasn't forgotten the loneliness. He needs Simon to forget it. It rains that day. 

...

In class, Baz realizes that they’re learning something new and hastily begins taking notes for Simon. There's no blood in the classroom. It's just students, taking notes. On the 3rd of June. School's almost out. A day has passed. 

 

Simon will want to know what he's missing. 

...

Thirteen days pass before Baz takes Simons body down. Maybe that will help.

...

It doesn’t.

...

Baz kisses Simon’s body and nudges all of his bruises and wounds. He kisses him goodnight. “I love you.”

...

When the authorities arrive, it’s easy to hide because Baz knows they won’t get it. He hides Simon inside of him, bit by bit. Pulling off long fingernails and slipping them down, pulling apart sinew and bone that has been pulverized long ago.

...

Simon liked high things and so on a hot warm day on in July, Baz jumped off one. 

No one was left alive to blink.

When they do the autopsy, they find two hearts. Baz would have said he knew he was doing the right thing when the slimy rotting heart of Simon met his lips.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: suicide, hella suicide, murder, major character death, little gore-y, and by a little I mean Simon turns into a Zombie and then is cannibalized, 
> 
> Please, leave feedback, let me know what you think! I really don't know what to think about this only that I apparently think the Simon Snow fandom is too happy.


End file.
